Hop-constrained multicast route packing with bandwidth reservation

Multicast technology allows the transmission of data from one source node to a selected group of destination nodes. Multicast routes typically use trees, called multicast routing trees, to minimize resource usage such as cost and bandwidth by sharing links. Moreover, the quality of service (QoS) is satisfied by distributing data along a path haying no more than a given number of arcs between the root node of a session and a terminal node of it in the routing tree. Thus, a multicast routing tree for a session can be represented as a hop constrained Steiner tree. In this paper, we consider the hop-constrained multicast route packing problem with bandwidth reservation. Given a set of multicast sessions, each of which has a hop limit constraint and a required bandwidth, the problem is to determine a set of multicast routing trees in an arc-capacitated network to minimize cost. We propose an integer programming formulation of the problem and an algorithm to solve it. An efficient column generation technique to solve the linear programming relaxation is proposed, and a modified cover inequality is used to strengthen the integer programming formulation.